Cristina Conesa Pla
Political Theory (LSE)
About Me
I am a 4th-year PhD candidate in Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I will be entering the academic job market in the fall of 2026. My doctoral research advances a situated and deprovincialised political theory through an in-depth study of contemporary Indigenous politics in Ecuador. Taking Ecuador as a sustained case study, the thesis develops both a methodological and a substantive contribution.
Methodologically, it adopts a multidirectional approach: it examines Indigenous resurgence through the political paradigms that have emerged from decades of Indigenous mobilisation in the Andes—most notably Buen Vivir/Sumak Kawsay, collective rights, plurinationality, and interculturality—while simultaneously interrogating those paradigms through the lens of Indigenous resurgence as an ongoing political practice. Rather than treating concepts such as plurinationality or sumak kawsay as static normative artefacts, the project reconstructs them as contested, evolving repertoires of political action. This layered analysis foregrounds the entanglement of institutional design, methodological framing, and normative argument in post-multicultural, post-colonial states. In doing so, it contributes to the ethnographic turn in contemporary political theory and participates in efforts to deprovincialise both political theory and Indigenous studies by taking Andean political thought as theoretically generative rather than merely illustrative.
Substantively, the thesis offers a detailed reconstruction of Ecuador’s contemporary political landscape, tracing how Indigenous actors navigate and reshape the state through projects such as plurinational constitutionalism. Whilst grounded in Ecuador, the analysis produces insights relevant to the Andean region more broadly. It develops new perspectives on core political-theoretical concepts—including popular sovereignty, conservatism, political difference, and decoloniality—by situating them within the concrete dynamics of Indigenous mobilisation and state transformation.
Beyond the thesis, my broader research agenda centres on situated political theory and the deprovincialisation of the discipline from the vantage point of political struggles and intellectual traditions that have too often been treated as peripheral. Please have a look at my CV to learn more about my background and teaching experience, awards and disciplinary service, and presentations at conferences and workshops.
Curriculum Vitae
Download my full academic CV for more detailed information.
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Research Interests
Indigenous Politics and Indigenous Resurgence
Providing a systemic account of indigenous resurgence as a political phenomenon.
Latin America and Andean Politics
Analyzing indigenous movements and state-building processes in Ecuador and the Andean region.
Paradigm Formation and Contestation
Investigating how indigenous paradigms emerge through processes of mobilization and institutionalization.
Conceptual Innovation
Developing theoretical frameworks to understand indigenous political alternatives and their global implications.
Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies
Engaging with decolonial thought to challenge Western political frameworks and epistemic assumptions.
Working Papers
The Double Bind of Difference: Indigenous Resurgence Between Alterity and Co-optation
2025 — Under Review
This article uses the mobilization of Sumak Kawsay (SK)—a Kichwa concept institutionalized as Buen Vivir in Ecuador's 2008 Constitution—to probe a paradox of difference: projects that mobilize distinctiveness are praised when they appear other yet dismissed as co-opted when they engage institutions. To navigate this bind, it advances a dual framework—partial connections and essential relationism—to explain how SK retains force across arenas. Partial connections show how claims travel through overlapping fields without collapsing into sameness; essential relationism offers a criterion of negotiated coherence that tracks how relational orientations endure across translations without fixed outcomes. Drawing on Amazonian, Andean, and urban Indigenous actors, it portrays resurgence as situated negotiation rather than assertion. SK politics emerges as dynamic world-making rather than as pure alternative. Developed from Ecuador, the framework clarifies how relational projects persist amid recognition, contestation, and constraint, while acknowledging risks of essentialism and co-optation.
The Conservative Disposition of Collective Rights: Reclaiming Cultural Control in Ecuador
2025 — Working Paper
This article examines the political disposition of Indigenous collective rights in Ecuador, arguing that they are best understood as conservative in a small-c sense: that is, as oriented towards preserving the fragile conditions of collective continuity rather than fixed cultural contents. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Kitu Kara pueblo and a genealogical account of Ecuador's constitutional recognitions (1998, 2008), the paper traces how collective rights function as juridical instruments for securing cultural control—authority over the territorial, institutional, linguistic, and epistemic infrastructures through which a people sustains its world. Against liberal and communitarian debates that fixate on the subject of rights, it reorients attention to their object: the conditions under which a collective can 'go on together' under postcolonial rupture. The argument situates this conservative disposition within reparative struggles against ethnocide and epistemic marginalisation, and demonstrates, through cases in intercultural education, higher learning, and urban land use, the ambivalence of juridification as both medium and constraint of self-rule. In doing so, it reconceives conservation as a form of political labour—one that maintains the capacity for self-governed change within a plurinational constitutional order.
Pluralising the People and Political Unity: Reconstructing the Plurinational and Intercultural State in Ecuador
2026 — Working Paper
How can a political community constitute itself as a unified people without erasing the plurality of forms of life through which that people exists? In postcolonial contexts, Indigenous challenges to the modern state's singular, citizenship-based demos have sharpened this tension. Taking Ecuador's plurinational and intercultural state as a theoretically generative case, this paper examines how political unity is constituted once it can no longer be assumed as pre-political fact. It advances two claims. First, it conceptualizes plurinationality as a process of demos-formation, showing how Indigenous claims to nationality intervene in the constitution of the political people itself rather than seeking recognition within an unchanged state. Second, it argues that interculturality functions as the mechanism through which political unity is reworked. Rather than a merely dialogical ethos, interculturality operates as a normatively consequential political logic mediating between distinct forms of authority. The Ecuadorian case thus illuminates a broader tension within decolonial state projects: even where authority is pluralised, political unity must still be normatively constituted.
Get in Touch
I’m always interested in discussing research collaborations, speaking opportunities, or potential academic positions.
Bluesky
@cristinaconesa.bsky.social